A sermon under the gloss
Youngblood Priest wants one more deal and then a life that does not require the deal. Gordon Parks Jr.’s Super Fly, released in the summer of 1972, follows Ron O’Neal through Harlem in a coat that photographs like armor and a Cadillac that photographs like a thesis. The plot is the old exit fantasy: one score, then out. What makes the film stick is not the fantasy. It is the friction between the pictures, which love the surface, and Curtis Mayfield’s songs, which refuse it.
Mayfield wrote Little Child Runnin’ Wild, Pusherman, Freddie’s Dead and Superfly as if he had been hired to score a different movie, one in which the coat does not win. The bass does not celebrate. It warns. Freddie’s Dead is a funeral marched at a tempo you can dance to, which is the cruelest and most honest trick in the score. The album arrived with the film and, for many listeners, outlived the plot. You can know Priest’s face from a poster and still have learned the story from the record, where the pusher is not a hero and the child is not a prop.
Parks Jr., son of the photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks, shoots the neighborhood as a place where style is a kind of shelter. Sheila Frazier, Carl Lee, the street itself: nobody is asked to stand in for a slogan. That refusal angered people who wanted Black cinema to be a classroom. Junius Griffin of the Hollywood NAACP heard a diet of pimps and pushers and said so. He was naming a real danger. He was also missing the argument Mayfield had already put on tape. The film glamorizes a man trying to leave. The songs describe what leaving costs, and who pays who is not in the Cadillac.
We must insist that our children are not exposed to a steady diet of so-called black movies that glorify black males as pimps, dope pushers, gangsters, and super males.
(Junius Griffin, Hollywood NAACP, 1972)
Super Fly became the highest-grossing film of its wave, then a template Hollywood would sand down into safer sequels and imitations. Priest’s last walk is still the image people quote. The better quote is a Mayfield line sung almost sweetly, which is how bad news travels when it wants to be remembered. Soul, in 1972, was not only devotion and romance. It could be reportage with a groove, a sermon that did not wait for the congregation to sit still. Parks gives you the coat. Mayfield tells you what the coat is made of.
Half a century on, the picture is watched in two ways at once, which is the right way. You see the cool, because the cool is real, hard-won, local. You hear the warning, because Mayfield would not sign a celebration. Between those two tracks, Super Fly remains a cult object that argues with itself in public. Few crime films bother. This one had a composer who thought the audience could hold a contradiction for the length of an album, and he was right.
